At my local fitness centre, I am detecting a change of tone in the locker room banter with respect to my electric car. I used to be joshed. “Where do you live? That’s ten miles away. You’ll be looking for a charger on the way home.” Or, “It’s a bit parky today. Wrap up, because you daren’t turn the car heater on.” Such remarks never bothered me. In fact, they amused me, because I knew that the petrolheads are on the wrong side of history, and, from that perspective, each gibe just sounded ridiculous. I used to experience the same sense of private satisfaction when I lived in New Zealand, and people used to cast remarks about Eotearoa being a parochial, anachronistic backwater. They’d never visited. Billy Connelly came to realise that such received wisdom with respect to NZ protected its beautiful unspoiled nature. He would say, “Dinnae tell anybody!”
But the remarks about my car have stopped. As a matter of fact, quietly, one of their chief proponents, and exponents, has just bought an electric car. I believe the decisive factor has been the situation in the Strait of Hormuz, leading to the increased prices of both petrol and diesel at the pumps. Depending on the latest utterance of Mr Trump, the price of a barrel of oil is either above or below $100. I don’t know if these day-by-day fluctuations matter much. I recall from the dim and distant past the stock market report on the BBC “Home Service”, which seemed to be an exercise in how many synonyms the announcer could dream up for either “increased” or “decreased”. “Gilts eased, commodities slumped, futures rallied…” I suppose it is the investors who pay close attention to such details, who closely peruse the small print in the newspapers, who decide whether the price of a commodity will daily rise or fall, but perhaps the prevailing trends over a longer period only become evident when “the man in the street” is affected, when, for example, he finds himself unable to fill up the tank.
So I can tell that the markets are definitely jumpy, now that the guys in the sauna are no longer teasing me. Hormuz remains, at least for most shipping traffic, gridlocked. I don’t know that anybody seriously expected the Veep, J. D. Vance, to fly home to Washington with a deal. There was rather just a sense of relief that talks didn’t entirely break down in a spirit of acrimony and animosity. It is said that J. D. never favoured the actions of February 28th in the first place. But I guess he must sing from the same hymn sheet as his President. The real test was, is, what the President will do given this impasse. Will he agree to a prolonged series of negotiations over months, perhaps years, or will he react? Will he, as he has threatened, destroy a civilisation? At the moment, he seems to be content with a tit-for-tat response that some people might regard as “proportionate”. He is going to blockade the Strait.
When I first heard this, I thought, wait a minute. Aren’t the Iranians doing that already? Mr Trump’s beef seems to be that yes they are, and what’s more, they are making money out of it. He doesn’t like to miss a business opportunity. So he wants to deter shipping companies from paying Iran a fee, in millions of dollars, to ensure safe passage. We have this paradoxical situation that the President, having urged the world to do what it takes to keep the Strait open, is now going to close the Strait. The effect of this policy will certainly be felt at the pumps.
There is no discernible end in sight to this impasse, because both sides have their “red lines”. In particular, the US wants guarantees that Iran will not attempt to build a nuclear weapon. They would like to confiscate however many kilograms of enriched uranium the Iranians possess. Here is another paradox. The US would deny the Iranians a commodity which they themselves possess in superabundance. There are, I gather, about 12,000 nuclear warheads extant in the world today, somewhere around half of them in the possession of the US. Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Israel hold the rest. Israel doesn’t like to talk about it. Nuclear powers justify such ownership in terms of “deterrence”. You might think twice about attacking a nuclear power. So, if such ownerships guarantees such security, why don’t the nine nuclear powers encourage the remaining 184 nation states (186 including the Holy See, and Palestine), to have at least one? The US could quite easily gift a warhead to every nation state without materially affecting the size of their own arsenal.
If this is an absurd proposal, it is worth analysing the nature of the absurdity. There is a general consensus that nuclear proliferation is a Bad Thing, and that a diminution of nuclear stockpiles worldwide would be good. The big sticking point is whether nuclear-powered nation states should disarm unilaterally, or bilaterally. The governments of nuclear-powered nations are not unilateralist, and indeed it may be said that in the current international situation they only pay lip service to bilateralism. We recognise the tropes: we are in dire straits; we live in a very dangerous world; now is not the time…
Another reason why Iran should not be permitted to have a nuclear weapon is that they, or at least their government, are a thoroughly bad lot. This may well be so, but the US are not in a good position to make the case, having been the only nation in history to cast atomic bombs, twice, in anger, against targets that were essentially defenceless.
I miss Brian Quail. He died a few months ago. He used to write letters of great eloquence to The Herald, in support of nuclear disarmament. He wasn’t an armchair theoretician. He used to lie down in front of nuclear convoys in central Scotland, get arrested, and go to jail. In one of his last court appearances, charged with breach of the peace, he pointed to the inherent absurdity of the charge. It was the government who threatened a breach of the peace; he was trying to preserve it. He must have argued most eloquently, for the judge found in his favour.
I think if Mr Quail were alive today, he would see the current world situation as presenting an ideal opportunity to take Trident out of Faslane, and Coulport, and transport the whole shebang down to the Thames, or perhaps across to the Hudson. You can hear these familiar tropes reverberating once more. “Dire straits… dangerous world… now is not the time…” But it never is the time. I would certainly like Scotland to join the 186 nations who do not consider it necessary to have a bomb. I have a notion that, eventually, we would find ourselves on the right side of history. No doubt our political masters in Westminster would ridicule us, but sooner or later even they will not be able to remain tin-eared to a swell of public opinion, the opinion of the man in the street.
Who was it said that there is no such thing as the man in the street? But that there are only immortal souls who, from time to time, need to use streets.
jamescalumcampbell 